


Silver Tongue to Golden Boi

by saltstatic



Series: How the Crew Became the Crew [2]
Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Fake AH Crew, Gen, No beta because fuck it, Pre-Fake AH Crew, Trans Character, rating might change later
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-04-11 11:06:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19108402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltstatic/pseuds/saltstatic
Summary: Gavin hated this place. Hated the corruption, the greed that came with running a criminal empire. Hated his “team” that didn’t feel like a team. It was all bullshit and everyday he wished he could leave. Just pack his bags, buy a plane ticket, and head out to some other country where he would never have to work for anyone he didn’t want to. Where he could pick and choose his jobs. But he knew that would never happen. The underground in the UK doesn’t let anyone go that is deemed good. And Gavin was good. The best in the business.





	1. Chapter 1

Gavin hated this place. Hated the corruption, the greed that came with running a criminal empire. Hated his “team” that didn’t feel like a team. It was all bullshit and everyday he wished he could leave. Just pack his bags, buy a plane ticket, and head out to some other country where he would never have to work for anyone he didn’t want to. Where he could pick and choose his jobs. But he knew that would never happen. The underground in the UK doesn’t let anyone go that is deemed good. And Gavin was good. The best in the business.

“Hey, Silver Tongue, can you get us in the building or not?”

Gavin sat up from where he had been slouched over his computer and turned to look at who spoke, recognizing him as one of the blokes who his boss had loaned him out to. Apparently, their hacker had gotten caught by the fuzz on their last job and they needed a temporary replacement until they could find a new one. And, of course, his boss thought that was a great opportunity to have another crew in the UK owe him a favor by “graciously” allowing them to borrow Gavin “Silver Tongue” Free for a job. For a price of course. Everything in this bloody country had a price, no matter how small. That’s something Gavin learned intimately when he accidently hacked into the wrong thing as a lad.

He had always been good with electronics, whether it be phones, computers, printers. Anything with an electrical system was like putty in his hands and he could bend it to his will with little to no effort. When he was a kid he was content with just fiddling with the normal stuff: changing the coding on Dan’s phone so that every time he typed something inappropriate a moan would sound out of his phone, whether the sound was on or not, or the one time he managed to hack into his school’s system the day before classes started and change every class’s location.  However, as he got older he started testing the boundaries more and more, figuring out how much he could push before something that was a bit of a challenge pushed back. Soon, he was able to hack into secure servers, museums, even the government at one point.

And of course, that’s when his trouble began. Because he was an idiot and hacked into a bank’s security system at the same time a crew was robbing the place. Dan always said he had a propensity towards doing things before thinking, something that helped him out when you had to type code faster than your brain could think, but it had never really bit him in the arse as hard as this one stupid mistake.

Once he had realized what was going on in the bank and seeing all the frightened people hovering on the ground, a couple looking suspiciously silent and unmoving, Gavin alerted the security alarm that the robbers had disabled which silently alerted the police of the robbery in progress. Gavin stayed on the cameras and watched as the fuzz surrounded the place and quickly quelled the situation with no casualties on either side. Later, when the news hit the telly, Gavin had never felt prouder as most of the robbers were carted off in cop cars.

And then a black sedan had pulled into his apartment complex and everything went to shit.

Gavin had managed to screw up a job for the biggest boss in the UK, Oliver Smith. Which meant Mr. Smith wanted a meeting with the guy who managed to beat and piss off the resident hacker. So, Gavin was dragged out of his apartment to some abandoned factory to meet with the man whose money he “stole”.

Long story short, to pay back Mr. Smith for ruining the robbery job (that would have made him millions) Gavin had to work for him until all the money was made up, plus a little bit more for the trouble and of course, since Mr. Smith never tried to hide the fact Gavin wasn’t getting out of this, interest as time dragged on.

And that’s how Gavin ended up in this situation, failing out of university as the hacking took up all hours of the day and stuck in this godforsaken room with the bloke who has a giant stick up his arse and an ego the size of the English Channel who keeps talking and _if he doesn’t stop I’m going to enable the alarms during the heist I swear-_ “Silver Tongue, are you even listening? This is important information critical to the mission,” the guy asks as he makes his way to the side of Gavin’s desk and starts waving his hand in Gavin’s face.

Without looking up from his computer he answered, “I am listening, but unless you want the thermal indicators in the building to come back on after I’ve turned them off, you’ll let me type my code out now instead of later.”

All of a sudden, he was turned around as the guy, _David his name is David_ , brandished a knife, “Is that a threat? Because if it is, it doesn’t matter who you work for I’ll gut you like a pig.”

Gavin barely glanced down at the knife, knowing he wouldn’t stab him and have Mr. Smith rain down hell, “It’s not a threat you idiot, the system has subroutines that make it so that even when the thermal indicators are turned off, for maintenance normally, they turn back on after five minutes. A guard has to manually keep resetting the timer if the maintenance takes longer, so I’m creating a program that would simulate the guard doing that without ever having it appear on the monitor,” he said as stared down David, “which I didn’t think I needed to explain to you as, how did you put it, ‘ _I don’t give a fuck how you turn the alarms off, just do it_ ’ was pretty clear.”

As Gavin finished talking, he turned back around and pointedly ignored the spluttering behind him as David tried to save face in front of his crew, “Well, we have 24 hours until the heist, I’m sure you could spare an hour of that to actually paying attention to the mission so you don’t botch it up for us. You may be Mr. Smith’s pet hacker, but that doesn’t mean you can just walk all over us!”

“I need all the time you can get me. This is an extremely secure building with some of the best security measures and counter-measures put into place, some of which I haven’t seen besides in high level government servers.”

“Are you saying you can’t get us in?”

Gavin laughed, “Oh, I can get you in. I’m just saying it will take a lot of pre-planning which _I should be doing right now_. So, if you don’t mind I’m going to go back to my apartment and will contact you tomorrow via your comms an hour before the heist in order to go over last-minute changes I might have for you. Good day gentlemen.”

And with that, Gavin stood up and made his way out of the abandoned warehouse the crew had been using as a base, making his way back to his apartment. When he got there, Gavin rebooted his computer and got back to work, zoning in as the familiar rhythm of coding sucked him in. Soon enough, he was done and decided to take a small nap before he had too deal with the gaggle of knob heads Mr. Smith loaned him out to.

Just as Gavin said, an hour before the heist was going to go down he got his comms set up so that they connected with the crew, “Alright guys, can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear Silver Tongue, although to say I miss your voice would be a lie.”

Gavin snorted, it seemed David liked to hold grudges and wasn’t planning on letting Gavin’s rather embarrassing dress down go away, “Alright, how ‘bout the rest of you? Anyone have any feedback?” The rest of the six-man crew voiced their agreement and with that, Gavin turned over the comms to David so he could give a brief rundown of the heist.

“Alright lads, you know the drill. In and out just as planned, and Marcus if you try to go off script like that one time in Leeds I’m going to _skin you alive_. The shit we’re retrieving is both time-sensitive and could get us in big with some of the underground leaders of Europe if we play our cards right. So, behave and do as I say. Gavin, we good to go on your end? No unexpected schedule changes in the system or people staying late to bone in their offices?”

“Nope, we are good to go whenever you give the signal,” Gavin said as he leaned into his monitor and started preparing to hack into the system, “Just insert the USB into the main hub of the computer and I can do the rest, should take about 5 minutes to download what you need.”

“Alright, James and I are pulling up to the front now. How about the rest of you? Marcus, you good to go on your end with the others?

Gavin heard a meaty thump resonate through the comms as Marcus answered David, “Yep, just took care of the last of the guards on the outer perimeter so you’re clear to enter.”

“Okay, Gavin, begin your part.”

Gavin unleashed his code onto the system and began guiding the guys through the building, being careful to keep all of the security measures unaware that they were currently being robbed. When the guys got to the main system room and plugged the USB in, Gavin immediately started going through it and trying to get all the information David had said he wanted.

Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted some interesting file names that were included in the info David wanted. Deciding he would look at them later, he immediately made a ghost file and copied all the info for himself as well before giving the all clear to David, who started extracting the rest of the guys from their own jobs. Once all the guys were outside and at least five kilometers from the site, Gavin pulled all his code out of the system and left the security system looking like no one had ever tampered with it.


	2. Chapter 2

“Good work you did there with the Leeds crew,” Mr. Smith said as he sat at the table he had reserved for this particular meeting with Gavin, “although, David seemed to be a little pissed at you. What did you do to provoke him?”

Gavin sat down opposite of Mr. Smith and glanced at the waiter as he poured him a glass of whatever wine Mr. Smith had chosen for the evening, “He questioned my abilities. I made sure he knew that I was good at what I did and didn’t need a bloke who knew nothing about computers telling me how to do my part of the job.” Gavin said before taking a sip of wine.

Mr. Smith smirked, “I trust you got everything done, and of course, left a backdoor for our use if we ever need to get back into that office?” with Gavin’s nod, Mr. Smith continued, “Well then, I have another job for you in the next coming weeks but other than that, your work with me is done for the night. Now, leave me. I have someone coming to dine with me and I’d prefer not to mix business with pleasure,” Mr. Smith said as he gestured to the door to the private room he had reserved, smiling in the way that made Gavin’s skin crawl.

He nodded and politely smiled before downing the rest of his wine glass in a single gulp. As he got up from the table and was reaching for the door handle Mr. Smith piped up from behind him, “Oh, and Gavin? You already know this, but make sure to delete any information you got from the heist, it’s bad form otherwise and I have a reputation to uphold.”

“Of course. I’ll dump the files as soon as I get home,” he said before exiting the room and quickly making his way out of the stuffy club Mr. Smith liked to frequent.

Once on the street, Gavin let out the breath he had been holding in the entire time. Any kind of meeting with Mr. Smith was stressful as his mood could turn at the drop of a hat, especially with alcohol in his system. And Gavin knew that he had put back at least a bottle before Gavin had even arrived. He pitied whatever escort Mr. Smith had hired for the evening, even if he had seemed in a rather good mood at the time. But, that was none of Gavin’s business and none of his concern as he turned to look for the metro entrance in order to get back to his apartment.

By the time he got to the front of his building, the sun had already set and he could hear the drunken noise of the pub he lived near starting to reach its loudest as whatever football match was being replayed reached its peak. Gavin trudged up the stairs of his building, the elevator having broken a long time ago and the landlord never bothering to fix it, and made his way to the shabby looking door at the end of the hall.

Gavin may not live in the nicest building London had to offer, but at least he was pretty secure in the fact that no one would want to rob the shitty building when there were much better fruits to pick down the street. Even if it meant Gavin had to live somewhere where he was pretty sure the mold had a mind of its own and he could smell the guy next door from his own apartment. No, it was much better to live here. Besides, Gavin knew that this was one of the only buildings in this area Mr. Smith had no ties to, which was a plus in Gavin’s book. Any modicum of freedom from Mr. Smith was a treasure he had to covet as the man basically owned the rest of Gavin’s life.

As Gavin hung his coat and toed off his boots, he started thumbing through his phone and checking the payment he received from David’s crew. While Mr. Smith took a lot of Gavin’s profit, he let him keep a little bit for rent and basic necessities; along with computer upgrades.

Looking at the numbers, Gavin transferred what he needed to his normal bank account and then quickly took the rest and put it in a secure account that not even Mr. Smith knew about. Looking at the string of numbers that both taunted him with salvation and damnation, he questioned himself again why he made the damn thing in the first place. While the money was a cushion to fall back on if he ever wanted to escape the life he was leading, safe in the fact that Mr. Smith couldn’t track him if he didn’t know the bank account, it was also a major threat to himself. If Mr. Smith ever found out about the account, Gavin knew he would be spending the rest of his life at the bottom of the ocean like the other blokes who crossed the boss.

Shaking his head out of the wormhole he was going down, one such wormhole he had spent several drunk nights lamenting over until he eventually came to the same decision of keeping the account, he walked over to his desk and collapsed into his chair.

Gavin booted up his computer and when it had finally woken up, he started cleaning up whatever was left over from the heist. As he was cleaning, he stumbled across the ghost file he created during the heist. Remembering the weird files, Gavin clicked on it, which immediately brought up all the info David had wanted. Skimming through the profiles and data, Gavin came across what had caught his eye: the shipments coming from Los Santos. Gavin knew that Los Santos was the crime hub for America and he also knew Mr. Smith was doing business with YT, who was currently the reigning gang of Los Santos. But, Gavin looked at the shipments and noticed something off about them, or more specifically the size of the files. There is no way a simple ship manifest would take terabytes of data. Messing around with the system set up, he learned there seemed to be code set up in the pdfs of the manifest so that when a pdf was booted up a certain way, there was alternate data as well. 

And as Gavin did just that, he realized why David had wanted that information so much. It seemed that whoever had set this up had compiled profiles for every prominent member of the crime community in Los Santos. But not just the general information you would expect. It included intimate details like safe house locations and passwords to secure servers. The kind of things only an insider will know and something that would turn the entirety of Los Santos into a chaotic warzone. With this kind of information, the YT crew would be overthrown and a power grab would begin.

Gavin quickly shut the files down and pulled all its existence off his computers and onto a separate hard drive. Once he was sure there was no evidence he ever had such files anywhere on his data, he shut his computers down as well and got up, quietly pacing through his apartment as he thought things over. Mr. Smith obviously didn’t know that David had this information, as he would have wanted Gavin to make fakes for David to have while holding on to the originals. Which meant that Gavin now had crucial information that could break Mr. Smith’s hold on international crime, specifically the prosperous connection with Los Santos which was the biggest city to funnel any item to and from America. But, if he showed the files to Mr. Smith it would mean that he disobeyed his orders not to look through other’s data and that could be more trouble than not telling. If Mr. Smith knew Gavin had been lying about that, he might start looking more closely into everything Gavin did, which would not be good. While the bank account was behind multiple firewalls and had no connection to Gavin, that didn’t mean other things couldn’t be found.

Things like the subtle data Gavin had been slipping to other hackers when it came to Mr. Smith’s power and reach. Or the files that mysteriously disappeared if they involved too many innocent lives that could be taken. No, it would not be good for Gavin to tell Mr. Smith about the data. But, he also couldn’t just let David sell it to the highest bidder. Because Mr. Smith would learn of it then and it wouldn’t take long for him to connect the dots between the files and the recent job Gavin had done. And then, Gavin would either have to lie about knowing what was in the files, which would not go well as Mr. Smith was a conniving bastard who knew when he was being lied to directly to his face, or tell him that he knew and potentially have his debt tripled or worse; Mr. Smith might think it’s time to get rid of a thorn in his side and just kill him then and there.

_I just have to figure out how to get the information out of David’s hands or make it so that David’s info is null and void by the time it breaks through to the higher circles,_ Gavin thought as he continued pacing and made his way into the kitchen. Hooking up the kettle, Gavin went about making himself some tea, hoping it would calm down his thoughts enough to form a coherent plan.

When Gavin finally finished making his tea, he grabbed his favorite mug and went into his living room before sitting on his couch and contemplating how exactly he could make it so that by the time Mr. Smith heard the information, because there was no solid way Gavin could wipe David’s memory of the files or get rid of them without it coming back to him, it had long since expired and was therefore useless. Or, make the information so useless David wouldn’t bring it up in the first place.

Gavin sat on his couch for what seemed like hours, long after his tea had gotten cold and stale, staring off into space and thinking. A million different parts of a plan swirling through his brain at high speeds as he sifted through points and discarded notions and plans before they could even take form. At some point, Gavin looked down at his phone only to realize it was nearing four in the morning, having been broken out of his stupor by the silence following the closing of the local bars as drunk patrons made their way to somewhere else. Getting up and stretching, he decided this was a problem for tomorrow and made his way to his bedroom, which consisted of a twin bed and a single nightstand. As Gavin fell asleep, his last thought was what a total mess he had gotten himself into.


End file.
